frightening stationers and insystem spacers, who believed every word of such
things.
He did not, above all, want to think of them now. He had little enough time to
do anything hereafter but keep Lucy tracking and keep his wits about him if
things went wrong. If he made the smallest error in calculation he could spend a
great deal of time at the first nullpoint getting himself sorted out, and he
could lose Dublin. The transit, empty as he was, would use up a month or more
subjective time; and Dublin would shave that… would laze her way across the
space of each nullpoint, maybe several days, maybe a week resting up, and head
out again. Lucy did not have such leisure. He had no plans to dump all velocity
where he was going, could not do that and hope to outpace Dublin’s deeper
stitches into the between.
The trank was taking hold. He thought of Dublin behind him, and the hazard of
it. He reached for the com, punched it in, narrow-focused the transmission, a
matter between himself and that sleek huge merchanter that came on his tail.
“Dublin Again, this is US 48-335 Y Lucy, number one for jump. Advise you the
buoy is in error. I’m bound for Pell. Repeat, buoy information is in error; I’m
bound for Pell: don’t crowd my departure.”
Lucy’s cold eye located the appropriate reference star, bracketed it, and he saw
that The terror he ought to feel eased into a bland, tranked consciousness in
which death itself might be a sensation mildly entertaining. He started the jump
sequence, pushed the button which activated the generation vanes while the buoy
squalled protest about his track—felt it start, the sudden, irreversible surety
that bizarre things were happening to matter and to him, that things were racing
faster and faster…
… conscious again and still tranked, hyper and sedated at once, a peculiar
coincidence of mental states, in which he was aware of alarms ringing and Lucy
doing her mechanical best to tell him she was carrying dangerous residual
velocity. The power it took to dump had to be measured against the power it took
to acquire—No dice throws. Calculate. Move the arm, punch the buttons. Dump the
speed down to margin or lose the ship on the next-Wesson’s Point: present
location, Wesson’s Point, in the appropriate jump range. Entry, proceeding
toward dark mass: plot bypass curve down to margin; remember the acquire/dump
balance—
“Sandy” That was Ross’s comp’s voice. “Sandy, wake up. Get the comp.”
There were other voices, that sang to him through the hum of dissolution.
Dead, Sandor. All dead. Sandy, -wake up. Time to wake up. Vent!
… acceptable stress. Set to auto and trank out for time of passage; set cushion
and pulser; two hours two minutes crossing the nullpoint, set, mark. Dead,
Sandor. All dead.
He came out of sleep with the pulser stinging his wrist and with an ache all the
way to his heels, unbelted and leaned over the left side of the cushion to
dryheave for a moment, collapsed over that armrest weighing far more than he
thought he should and caring far less about survival than he should, because he
had gone into this too tired, with his defenses too depressed, and the trank was
not wearing off. He ought to be attending to controls. He had to get something
to eat and drink, because he was going again in half an hour, and that was too
little time.
He reached down and got one of the foil packets, managed with palsied fingers to
get it open, and got the ripped corner to his lips —chewed food which had no
taste but salt and copper—felt after the water and sucked mouthfuls of that,
dropped the empty foil and the empty bottle, felt the food lying inert in his
stomach, unwanted. He got the other shot home, beginning to trank out again…
forced his eyes to focus on the boards, while Lucy shot her way along at a
hairbreadth margin from disaster. Sometimes there was other junk ringing a
nullpoint, a dark platelet of rocks and ice and maybe, maybe lost spacers who
used the deep dark of this place for a tomb…